The 39th Telluride Film Festival announced Monday morning the guest director for this year’s event: British novelist and essayist Geoff Dyer.

The vaunted film gathering takes place Labor Day weekend (Aug. 31-Sept. 3) and has become over the years the kick off to cinema’s award season. Last year, Telluride screened the U.S. premiere of “The Artist.” The year before that, it treated audiences to “The King’s Speech.”

Doggedly mum about its line-up — which it releases opening day — the festival announces the guest director slot early. For good reason: The draftee is always a standout. Movie aficianados tapped for the gig in the past include Stephen Sondheim, Laurie Anderson, Caetano Veloso and Lacanian maverick and the 2008 festival’s unlikely celeb Slavoj Zizek.

When New York Times book critic Dwight Garner chose Dyer’s collection “Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews 1989-2010″ as one of his top books of 2011, he described Dyer as “among the best essayists on the planet.” In March, that volume won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.

But it’s likely Dyer’s latest work that sealed the deal. “Zona,” which carries the subhead “A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room” takes on — in an obsessive’s highly personal vein — Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film “Stalker.”

“Dyer casts himself as ‘Stalker’s’ stalker; getting there, as cruise lines used to advertise, is half the fun,” wrote film critic and historian J. Hoberman in a review of “Zona.” “‘We are in another world that is no more than this world perceived with unprecedented attentiveness,’ he writes, and his own close attention is admirable.”

In a statement, Dyer said of his new cinematic duties, “Even more than the honour and the pleasure (of programming for Telluride) I’m glad finally to be putting an end to the envy I felt whenever I met people who’d just come back from Telluride and insisted on telling me that they’d had the most wonderful time of their lives. I’m no stranger to having a good time over the Labour Day weekend: I used to go to Burning Man and was quite evangelical about it. I fully expect to be as passionate a convert to Telluride.’”

Lisa Kennedy has been The Denver Post film critic for quite a spell. The job returned her to the town she grew up in after 20 years of living elsewhere: mostly in New York City. During the time she's been back, she was voted into the National Society of Film Critics, a first for a Colorado reviewer. When she began Diary of a Mad Moviegoer, she wasn't just cribbing from Tyler Perry. In fact, she seldom goes all Madea on movies, thinking the gig is more like a conversation than a competition about who's right about which flick.